All my lab flasks are "ghost lab flasks"!

[Hashi]

j/k I know my sarcasm is misunderstood! Found that out on the eidos forums....

Yes, but what you have to understand about the Eidos forum is it's full of cunts.

Yeah the people there are funny. Before the game was released, people were crying about all sorts of decisions in the game, and everything became apocalyptic, end of the world, or even worse, end of Deus Ex etc. Some very funny people on those forums. Comedic people who are good to laugh at, not with

[Jonas]

To be fair, we had a lot of that going around here as well

[DDL]

Fucking health regen

[Hassat Hunter]

Yup.
I've experienced it some more now in Bulletstorm and "hey, just hide like a coward and get healed" still is the most stupid part...
Made it overall damn easy too. I only died if I screwed up with controls, moving out of cover...

(Still haven't played DX:HR)

[DaveW]

I used to hate it, but it does fix that fundamental flaw in all old shooters where you accidentally quicksave on really low health and each time you load, you die instantly.

It does make games a load easier though, and since AI still sucks there's nothing to balance it. Though it was 'bad' game design is what made Bulletstorm so piss-easy, since it was about 80% cutscene.

I'm sure games can be difficult and have regenerating health, I just can't name any.

[Hassat Hunter]

Mass Effect II I suppose.

Though that difficulty with regen health reduced it to "hug wall, shoot, regenerate, shoot, regenerate, [...], enemies dead. Repeat next location...

[DDL]

I'll be honest, I didn't really mind the health regen in HR (I was being facecious above): in vanilla DX on realistic, at least playing it stealthy rather than bulletspongey, you pretty much only really 'lose' health (as opposed to just dying outright) from stray assaultgun bullets at huge range, environmental hazards, and falling. All of these whittle away at health, sure, but generally in a managable form. The rest (i.e. being shot by anything other than an assaultgun) is usually an instagib.

In HR on 'give me deus ex' (god I hate that) difficulty, again playing stealthy rather than bulletspongey, the same pretty much applies, except instead of having to use a medkit for irritating falling damage or being pinged by a lucky long range gunner or whatever, you just had to wait a while. In terms of "o shit I dun been spotted sneakin up behind this here dude", both DX and HR pretty much just flat out killed you, health regen or no.

I admit that I've never actually tried playing DX the bulletsponge way (I suspect it doesn't particularly excel in that department anyway), nor have I tried HR that way either. And I can imagine HR might indeed seem a bit more like a mass effect-alike if you played it like a cover-based shooter.


So yeah, while I did miss the hilarious DX moments of deciding which of your missing legs gets the tender care of your last medkit, I didn't miss it that much.

Plus I got a giggle from the image of jensen horfing down a whole giant tub of mystery mech-energy powder in one go.

"I never asked for this.."

*horf* *glarg* *choke* *wheeze*

"I might ask for a glass of water though.."

[bobby 55]

Heh, get the silenced sniper rifle and playing HR shootified is a lot of fun.

[Jonas]

I'll be honest, it irks me when people condemn regenerating health as flat out bad design (not saying anybody here does that, but it definitely happens). It's totally fine to not like the sort of gameplay that regenerating health creates, I mean fuck - 90% of game discussion revolves around essentially subjective problems - but you have to admit that health regeneration creates exactly the kind of aesthetic that it's meant to create: Cliff Bleszinski semi-famously explained that he stole Kill.Switch's cover system for Gears of War because he was getting annoyed with the run-and-gun gameplay of shooters at the time, and how it felt more like playing with water guns compared to playing paintball.

When you're playing with waterguns you don't give a shit about being hit, because that's part of the fun, so you just charge around firing wildly (like in Unreal or Quake). When you're playing paintball on the other hand, getting hit fucking hurts, so you keep your head down and behave much more similarly to how a real soldier behaves in war (I said more or less, as the actual fear of death of course doesn't compare to the fear of getting a big fucking bruise on your thigh or whatever). So cliffy nicked the Kill.Switch cover system because it actually made you behave more like a real soldier, using tactical cover much more deliberately by emphasising the difference between being in cover and not being in cover and increasing lethality of the latter.

Health regeneration does almost the same thing but without treating cover quite so binarily. By forcing you to duck back into cover when the concentration of lead being flung in your direction becomes too great, real life dynamics such as suppression, covering fire, flanking, and tactical grenade use become much more important and the flow of combat approaches something that may not actually be much closer to real life, but certainly feels it in many respects.

I was opposed to adding health regeneration to Deus Ex because the visceral* feel of the minute to minute firefights were never really the point so much as the longer-term strategy and resource management of it. Deus Ex is a super nerdy game in that respects, it has those resource management elements from the traditional role-playing genre, and I guess that's a pretty hard sell to most people - I mean let's face it, most people aren't nerds, and most people play games now. It definitely changes the nature of Deus Ex, and I think it's totally okay to criticise that, but even though I disagree with the change on an intellectual level, I still enjoyed DXHR a lot and I didn't feel like the health regeneration hurt the game noticeably. Maybe because it was overshadowed by how stupid the energy management system was

---

* I feel weird about using "visceral" as a positive word now that I know it's actually the medical term for sensory input generated by the internal organs, which means visceral feelings are typically excruciating and indicative that you're seriously ill or dying.

[gamer0004]

The very problem (opposite to your reasoning) about regenerating health is that, for me, it actually completely fails to convey a feeling of consequences. Indeed, when playing with waterguns there are no consequences, when paintballing there are. Likewise, losing health in DX actually matters and losing health with regenerating health doesn't.
The result is that it feels even more run and gun with occasional weeping in a corner, rather than an actual firefight where it's necessary to hide behind cover because of suppressive fire. Suppressive fire works in real life because people are terribly afraid of the consequences of showing any body part to then enemy while under fire, that is: dying, for IRL one bullet to the head is usually lethal and the consequences of a bullet anywhere in the chest range from paralysis to slow painful death.
The exact opposite is the case with regenerating health: NO long term effects, NO real danger because if the player is hit he can go back behind cover and recover. Instead of having to hide and fire blindly the player can simply go from cover, kill a few enemies and return after he has been hit once or a few times.
That doesn't mean regenerating health is bad design for every game (I think it works in CoD), but in any case it results in a game which is more run and gun than if using non-regenerating health + medkits.

(Just look at your own experience. Compare playing CoD at a high difficulty setting to FEAR or STALKER* at a high difficulty setting. The latter involves lots of leaning, carefully going forward and hiding behind cover as much as possible, whereas CoD still involves running and gunning with occasional hiding.

*I know STALKER has some regeneration, but it is so small that players can't rely on it in combat.)

[Jonas]

Ideally if you don't stay behind cover in a game with regenerating health, the consequence is that you will be dead incredibly quickly. If it's not so, you're either playing on too low difficulty or the game is simply balanced to be too easy, which isn't the fault of the health regeneration.

As for long-term consequences, well it's no different than stealth when you think about it. In a stealth game, the AI tends to reset itself after a while when you've been spotted, to avoid a situation where you get stuck. In a combat game, health regeneration is your chance to recover from a mistake if you're quick enough to get back to proper cover. Long term consequences are good, but they can completely and utterly screw you over, and it's worth remembering that not everybody will tolerate that sort of punishment.

I never played FEAR and I played STALKER with god-mode because it was freaking me out too much otherwise, so I can't speak on those points. I did play Deus Ex much like you described though. Until I got the health regen aug at least.

[paladin181]

I found cover to work ok in DXHR. The main problem is I went for a run and gun mentality, but quickly decided to just clear rooms from cover. The problem is, you MUST clear the rooms. People will otherwise converge on your cover positions to keep you from just hiding and regenerating. Enemy grenade AI isn't horrible either when they have them. I tried a non-lethal playthrough just for the grin, but when I realized there was only one or two real scenes where there was any difference, the balance threw me off. I started taking people down for the exp before plugging them in the face. After all, can't revive a corpse.

In all, I really wanted to try a shoot everyone approach, but then the game is mind numbingly simple, even with an AI that isn't completely stupid. I take it back, the game wasn't really MUCH easier, but it was a lot faster. I was able to clear rooms and advance about 3x as fast as my stealth play throughs. Setting up mine traps and the like or hacking turrets was pretty fun, if low on the exp scale.

[DaveW]

Agreed on basically everything you said Jonas - though the problem I had with GOW is that you're almost constantly in cover. I understand wanting to make a visceral experience and make the enemies feel powerful etc. etc. - but there's a point where shooting from cover becomes gets tedious and takes the challenge away. I stopped playing after the second level because even on the most difficult mode it was piss easy if you shot from cover, and if you weren't in cover you died incredibly quickly. I really could not be bothered.

I think HR had a good compromise, since it seemed to be extremely similar to Rainbow Six Vegas 2, which I thought was fantastic. In both games you could conceivably not use cover and still play the game, and most of the time I just used cover to wait for guards to turn before sneaking up on them (and in this case, the cover system works much more than leaning in Thief/DeusEx.)

But..yeah, health regeneration isn't bad game design, it's just not good game design either without a lot of balancing.